A collection of best practice articles to help grow companies with an emphasis on finance. The goal of the blog is to explain how these best practices work, enabling anyone to put these ideas to immediate use. Articles are written by Matt H. Evans, CPA, CMA, CFM

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NOTE: Effective January 1, 2017, I will no longer post new articles since I am now fully retired.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

There
is little doubt that we now live in a world of Black Swans – unexpected events
that can suddenly change everything. The term “Black Swan” was coined by Nassim
Nicholas Taleb in his landmark book: The Black Swan. Taleb argues that
random unknown events now drive much of what happens in the world today and
because of reckless thinking on the part of our institutions, coupled with
global networks and complexity, we can all expect a lot more black swan events
in the future. All you have to do is look back over the last ten or twenty
years to see it – 9/11, Financial Crisis, and Turmoil in Egypt are all black
swan events.

Increasingly
people have lost faith in our financial institutions. We are seeing major
fluctuations in currencies and commodity prices (such as a 50% drop in oil in
2014). Additionally, government leaders are unwilling to put serious guidelines
in how markets should work for the benefit for all.

We
now live in a world where over 60% of all stock trading is done by computers in
nano-seconds. We now live in a world where the Federal Reserve engages in
something called “quantitative easing” which positively impacts Wall Street
more than Main Street.